06/03/2014

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensity.

-Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace

In a recent episode of EconTalk, “Yuval Levin on Burke, Paine, and the Great Debate,” Russ Roberts talks to Levin on how the debate between Burke and Paine is a useful perspective to look at the left/right divide in politics. Whereas Paine emphasized the possibilities of human achievement if man were to be liberated from the political and cultural constraints around him, Burke emphasized how those political and cultural constraints made the human achievements worth celebrating possible.

Paine’s optimistic portrayal of man’s ability to make a world for himself was echoed in Common Sense when he wrote: “We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke’s attitude is summarized in the following passage from Reflections on the Revolution in France: “I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases… but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how to make the most of the existing material of his country.” The two could be almost no more opposed about how they think about how the constraints upon human beings have influenced human prosperity.

Myself, I have great enthusiasm for Burke. Nevertheless, I don’t think that the debate between Burke and Pain, or even just Burke’s critique of Enlightenment thought, is as important as thinking about the proper way to look at classical liberalism. Burke is unfairly branded as a conservative critic of liberalism, but really he is one of its staunchest defenders against the excesses of Enlightenment thought. Burke recognized the important of historical context to the flowering of liberty and we should not brand him as a conservative merely for that fact. Reflections on the Revolution in France was one of the books that converted me away from a Rothbardian perspective on politics. Although Murray Rothbard is excellent in how we sets up his definition of liberty and what follows from that definition, he is much less excellent in describing instances of liberty in the actual world.

In his Second Speech on Coniliation with the Colonies,” Burke expressed the necessary historical context of liberalism when he wrote that “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, does not exist. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.” When talking about the colonists’ desire for freedom, he didn’t do it from the point of view of Enlightenment though, as Paine had done in Common Sense; instead, he discussed them as the descendants of Englishmen desiring the freedom which Englishmen had become accustomed for. Burke’s dislike for purely abstract statements is emphasized in the second letter of his Letters on a Regicide Peace, when he wrote about the “hocus-pocus of abstraction.”

Burke was careful in positioning himself as an opponent of the arbitrary construction of liberty. He argued that the fulfillment of liberal desires weren’t to be found in destroying what came before and erecting a new nation from the ashes, but in taking what was best from a nation’s past and using that as the basis for the future.

When comparing the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution then occurring, Burke differentiated the ideals of the Glorious Revolution with that of the French, writing: “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.” For Burke, the only sustainable liberal civilization was one that had developed liberal traditions over a long period of time. Whereas Burke pointed to Magna Carta, and English common law as evidence for the historical origin of English liberty, he pointed to the excessively metaphysical characteristics of the Rights on Man as evidence that the French Revolution was an exercise in hocus-pocus liberalism.

Edmund Burke shall always be a challenging figure for some because of how he emphasized that we are all tied to the histories of our nations and how he emphasized that man is a fallen creature who succeeds largely because of the constraints put on his desires by tradition. Whereas other Enlightenment figures, like Thomas Paine, presented an optimistic view of humanity which held that humanity could achieve great things if only the chains of the past were broken asunder, Burke took the line that the great things that humanity has done is because of our history, our traditions and sources of authority, not in spite of them.

Since he was critical of French Enlightenment thought, Burke has been viewed to be a conservative critic of the Enlightenment perspective on politics, but that judgment is faulty because Burke is no conservative. In the Reflections, Burke went as far to say that a nation that couldn’t change had no means of sustaining itself. In both the Reflections and his impeachment speeches, Burke doesn’t look at tradition as something monolithic and as something sacred per se; instead, Burke wrote about how tradition is necessary for the organization of human society and how good traditions can be used to promote good outcomes. The Glorious Revolution, because it built upon what was already good in the English traditions of common law, representative government, and Magna Carta in order to promote liberty whereas the French Revolution tore down the monarch and replaced it with metaphysical hocus pocus. Even though Burke was critical of the Enlightenment, he was still a champion of liberty. Moreover, he was champion of liberty within its proper historical perspective.

Burke is and ever shall be one of the most eloquent defenders of a liberal civilization. He challenges us to think about the liberal civilization within the context of human events rather than metaphysical doctrines. Thomas Paine may teach us much about recognizing the form of liberty, but he falls prey victim to what Hayek called constructivist rationalism: An overconfidence is the constructive capabilities of reason based on the delusion that all the necessary facts to construct a new order are available. Pain was wrong about the course that the French Revolution would take. It wasn’t a flowering of American-style liberty in Europe, but rather a movement that would eventually cannibalize itself.

Burke can help us understand how liberty has evolved, and how the liberal civilization cannot simply be constructed, but must instead be grown. Unlike Paine, he understood that a liberal civilization is grown, not constructed. It is a product of a peculiar historical context rather than a product of the brilliance of the human mind.